Last week, Riot Games announced a governing body for all League of Legends collegiate esports: the Riot Scholastic Association of America. Their first meeting was held on opening day of the 2019 College League of Legends Championship quarterfinals. What was supposed to be a three-hour inaugural meeting with the RSAA advisory board doubled in length, as members discussed their plans for the RSAA.
ESPN Esports caught up with Riot Games college program lead Michael Sherman, Riot Games scholastic lead Matthew Birris and advisory board members Mark Deppe, UC Irvine's director of esports, and Kurt Melcher, the executive director of esports at Robert Morris University and executive director of esports at Intersport to discuss the future of the RSAA and collegiate LoL in a roundtable discussion.
ESPN: To our two advisory board members, how were you approached to join the board?
Kurt Melcher: I was approached by Sherman officially via email, but we chatted conceptually about what Riot was thinking. I think he knew, I mean it was just a formality. I was 100 percent interested in doing it. I probably would think the same for Deppe.
Mark Deppe: Yeah, I am passionate about the idea of governance in esports, and I personally think the developers have to have a very active role.
Melcher: Oh, I thought you were going to say you wanted to be the emperor: "I'm very passionate about being the king."
Deppe: (laughs) No! But yeah, we've been talking about the potential for this, the ability for this and the need for this, so yeah, we had talked casually at first and then there was an official email invitation.
Michael Sherman: This iteration of the RSAA really started to get drafted July last year. For a long time I think we've been pretty open about having discussions, we've been on panels saying, "Yeah, we're going to build a board of advisors" as early as September last year. I think by the time we talked to a lot of people we were already pretty out in the open about our interest in doing this and had a lot of support, especially from these two and everyone we talked to. They mentioned that it was almost a formality at that point, and it really was like, "Hey, I've been talking to you about this for a really long time, here are the actual details."
Melcher: It almost feels like it's just formalizing something that was happening organically on the other side. I used to give feedback to these guys after a season of what I thought. Not just "Hey, these brackets" or whatever, but, 'Hey we should start thinking about students, grades, eligibility,' just a bunch of different points of view. I'm sure Mark did the same and others at conferences. It was more like saying that this was happening already and packaging it as something more formal.
Sherman: What I think stood out from both of you actually is, I think the week before the championship, we had a meeting and you had typed up a doc for everyone that was like, "Here's some things I learned from this season" and then after your first season as well (gestures to Deppe) we went down to your arena, and it was my first time meeting Matt as well.
Matthew Birris: Yeah, I remember that season. I was like, "Wow, bullet points. I love this guy!" (laughs)
Sherman: And it was literally, "Here's all the things we thought about." So there's always been open discussion. Even back then we talked about regional conferences, but then time zones are a real challenge. I think we've always believed in having an open conversation with the people at the school level, and as they mentioned, this was an opportunity to add more structure, transparency, and visibility.
ESPN: I asked Sherman and Birris this already, so to Melcher and Deppe, what is the platonic ideal or the perfect version of the RSAA?
Melcher: Oh wow, we may have different answers actually. (laughs) It would be great to think, or it would be great to have the RSAA board be able to really help drive decision-making. We talked about this a little yesterday. What does it look like? If the board brings a concept or an idea forward that they feel passionately about, but Riot, either due to things we don't know about or for whatever reason are like, "Nope, that's not going to happen and we can give you good answers as to why not," but there may be a little tension there. You hope that everyone is pushing hard enough so that does happen, but what does that look like when we have conflict? And that's not negative. Being able to have a voice and drive the direction I think is the perfect version. Thinking about collegiate esports, Riot and others have done a good job of growing it, and this is the next step it feels like.
Deppe: For me, I see two target areas that I want to improve in. One is building this great ecosystem. Making college League of Legends as organized and professional and predictable with the right rule set that allows it to thrive. So making a really great structure. And the second thing is to make sure that college League of Legends is supporting the mission of universities, which is to take young people, provide them with some skills and send them out into the world so in that sense, how does college League of Legends make the world a better place? Those are my two big ideas: creating the perfect environment and making sure that environment is productive.
Birris: I'll add that for me, there's a sweet spot of opportunity for students, for schools, for publishers, for the entire ecosystem, and that's pretty challenging to identify and hone in on. It's not something that Riot can identify on its own. So for us, the best model is to have the right people in the room, and we had extensive conversations yesterday about one, excitement that we have the right core in the room, and what other voices will need to be represented in order for us to make some of these really important decisions. To me, that's the ideal. Identifying what I know is a big opportunity space that creates value for everyone involved.
ESPN: One thing that both Sherman and Birris mentioned is that you want to take the existing infrastructure at colleges and universities and plop League of Legends in there, see how it fits and have a more open line of communication. You can't apply a 1:1 traditional sports model to esports because there is a game developer involved, so where do you see your role as the game developer in everything?
Sherman: I'll have a biased opinion obviously, but I think the introduction of a publisher is going to be healthy in growth. We already have an incentive to grow this. We believe in making League of Legends a global sport that lasts for generations. We're really invested in the long-term success of the product. Which means that we're constantly looking at where can we take the current success and inject strategic investment across the industry. That's how we've looked at our decision-making and how we choose to participate. So in that regard, when I think about the publisher, it's like, "Imagine having a third-party who admittedly has funds they can spend against this growth."
That, and we wanted to bring in the right people to make sure that we're doing that effectively, because we know what a game publisher would think about doing, but to Mark's point, how are we making sure that it's a complimentary part of the university? I think that Mark really early on had a conversation with me that was like, "Esports can't just be a single issue, check-a-box type thing. It needs to play a role across the university." A university can choose to do a ton of things, so why is esports going to be a thing that they should be investing in? As the publisher, we won't always know that, but we do have resources and advantages on our side to make sure that we're doing that well.
The last thing I'll add is that it's not a totally foreign model. There are sports, even in colleges, there are governing third parties (outside of the NCAA) that run the tournaments and championships and are sanctioned by the NCAA. The idea that we're a third party that's seen as being able to run the sport is not a brand-new concept.
Melcher: I think the RSAA has to look differently, because to Sherman's point, if it was just a sports guidance group you would be best served to bring in high-level coaches and program directors only. This is League and esports on campuses. There are so many different iterations and everything is so varied. You have to bring in a big cross-section to try to solve all of those stakeholders' issues from clubs with support to clubs without support knowing inclusion is really important. Who has a voice in that group? It needs more people because there's more to do.
Deppe: We did an exercise yesterday where we made a list of the stakeholders involved, and the list was much longer than I expected. We got into parents, faculty, presidents, directors, players, coaches -- and that's a lot of people. Then you have the media and the general public and the League of Legends community, everyone's going to have to be comfortable with where we are going to go.
UCI Esports Director Mark Deppe gives some context behind esports to members of congress.
Sherman (to Deppe): Not too long ago you were in D.C. talking to Congress.
Deppe: Congress! Yeah, Congress is now looking at this. (laughs)
Melcher: Yeah, and universities are such complex ecosystems, and to further complicate this, there are so many differences from university to university. Robert Morris University is a lot different than UCI. And there's different goals. At RMU it's just esports. We don't have other clubs using our space, it's varsity and junior varsity only, so schools have different goals in how they want to interact with gaming and esports and that's fine. I think it can play a variety of roles on campus and still be impactful depending on what that school's goals are.
ESPN: For our two program directors, have either of you heard or been asked by your players and staff about what the RSAA is, or what's going on? Do they have any concept of what was going on with the NCAA previously poking around? What's the general opinion from the actual students?
Deppe: I will say it's not hitting hard on their radar. (laughs) I will say there's a pretty negative feel for the NCAA very broadly. Maybe not strong opinions from everybody, but the whole environment is kind of worried about that. I will say that the issues we will deal with are very impactful to them. When we're talking about scholarship amounts, timing of tournaments, roster sizes, those are all very tangible things that they care deeply about, so I think they will realize that it's really cool that their director has a seat at the table. Our coach is much more interested.
Sherman: Yeah, he already asked me about it earlier.
Deppe: I'm sure he's already asked for a spot on the board. (laughs) But yeah, I don't think players have an idea of what a governing board's role is, but I think it will be a very good thing for them. I do think we need some player voices at the table.
Melcher: The bottom line is that we want to make the experience better for those players. Same for their general idea of League of Legends. Player focus has always been the headline for Riot, and that's why we're there -- we care about our players and these varsity systems.
Sherman: We run a Discord server with all of the college coaches, players -- it's a massive server, lots of memes, lots of jokes -- but also lots of questions. So when the story first came out from the Sports Business Journal, they asked, "Hey, what is this? What does this mean?" It continued even while players were here. On Tuesday they were asking me when they were going to learn more. Mostly managers and coaches, but a few players. I think one of the things that we've always picked up going into this, we haven't defined what this is. When we built the board, it was a lot more of, "Do we have the right people in the room?" And we saw a lot of comments like, "I feel really good seeing so-and-so up there." We had our first meeting yesterday. We were supposed to meet for three hours. We met for six. It wasn't six because nobody could agree. It was six because we were like, "This is great, we're going to keep going deeper." We felt like we had the right people in the room during that conversation.